Your Property Success Mentor April 26-04-2018

Everyone, we're just ready to get started. So just before we do, we'll do the disclaimer that it's important to understand and take care in applying what you hear on this call to your own personal circumstances. Everyone's situation is different and all the information in today's call is based on our personal experiences and opinions and is not intended to be specific to your circumstances. We're not real estate agents, financial planners, lawyers or accountants and are not liable for any loss, damage or misunderstanding caused by reliance on any of the information provided or inferred. Now, we also record these calls. So by participating in this call, if you're asking a question, you will be on the recording. If you would like us for some reason to edit you out of the recording, you can call our office on 1-300-963-646 within 24 hours and we can take you out of the recording. And with all that out of the way, let me introduce you to Jane Slack Smith. There you go, Jane, you're on.

Hey.

Hi everyone.

How you going? It's Jane here. And welcome to our next monthly call. It's been a very, very busy month here for John and I and a pretty exciting one as well. We've been doing so many things, haven't we, John?

Yeah, sure has had a lot of stuff going on mainly. I guess I will get to it anyway. But Location Masterclass has been the big, big change around here in the last, you know, three or four weeks. But lots of, lots of other stuff as well.

Well, you know, the thing is, for those of you who are new to the club or the Ultimate Guide of Renovation or even Location Masterclass, a great big welcome to you or Investors Choice diamond clients or Investors Choice Mortgages Gold clients. This is the right place to be. And once a month we will answer all of your questions. So between us, John and I, I think we've ever had a question we've left unanswered and if there's something we don't know, we'll go and find it out for you. So you're in the right place. And, and I think just to give you a little heads up, if you are new, these Q and A calls, the group calls, are specifically for you. You can send us questions questionsourpropertysuccess.com and we'll gather those up or you can join us live. And I've just put the link up there. If you do have microphone and a webcam, then what will happen if you click on that link, you'll come into our lobby and when we're ready to bring you up on screen, we'll bring you up on screen. So it's always really cool to do that. If you're on a mobile dev, just download the app. So you have to be a bit prepared for it. So if you're listening to this in recording, get ready for next month. But if you're on a computer, hit the link and you'll jump straight in. Now, as always, John, we say you can leave us a message. I don't know. We've been doing this for over three years. 1376, triple 1 9. John, breaking news. Were there any messages?

None this week, unfortunately, Jane, but we live in hope.

We do live in hope. Well, before I get cracking on this, I just want to introduce the person who is on the other screen, John Hubbard, who is running this event today. And we've. I'm just going to hand it over you, John, and give us the a bit of a rundown. John's the co creator of the ultimate guide to Renovation, Location, Masterclass, the Club and so much more. John, what have you been up to this month?

What have I been up to? Now the first can people tell me, is my screen frozen? Because it looks as if I'm frozen there. If you could just type in the chat there. If I'm coming up as frozen, what I might do. Jane, if I could just solo you for a second and then I'll come back to myself and just make sure that. There you go. So your screen's good, but my screen seems to. I'm just going to refresh my page here. Second.

Hi everyone.

Technology.

What we've had happen in the last couple of weeks is a lot of changes to Facebook. So the technology and the tools that we use to talk to you are often a little bit difficult as well. So if you're on the call and you hear us and we're coming through loud and strong, please let us know. Put a comment in and say hello and we will get to your questions because we want to make sure that we have all of your questions answered.

All right, we're back with movement.

I'm still on solo, I think.

No, we're back. Yeah, so that's good. So what's been happening? Well, I think the biggest news for us, Jane, is the we've been talking about this for a long time, but we took the components, the location components of the Ultimate Guide to Renovation and put it into a standalone course, which is, I guess more has a broader appeal to people that are interested in property investing and not just renovation as a property investment strategy and which we've called Location Masterclass and we've started to. We've beta tested that. So we've just spent a lot of time beta testing it. We've had our first small group of people through it as paying clients and yeah, and still taking feedback and stuff on that, which we folded back into Ultimate Guide as well. But that's been probably the most exciting news and a huge amount of work. But yeah, and the feedback's been fantastic.

You know, the thing I love about the fact that we can share the location component is when we talk about this often we have a large number of people who come to the Ultimate Guide to Renovation or, or even to investors choice mortgages or to different groups even in the club and they've been through some type of education, be it by themselves or be guided by another educator and they've been unhappy about the property that they've had. And I think the thing there is that it all comes down to the location being the missing link. And everyone knows my Trident strategy, you know, that I love adding value through renovation and taking the property to a higher use, creating some equity and creating some rent. But when we talk about renovation, it's not for everyone, we get that. But the location is key and that's why in the Ultimate Guide of Renovation, the first six modules all about location. So, you know, the Location Masterclass, being able to bring that out and trying to, you know, really get in front of people and get that right kind of systematic approach to how to buy property, then opening up the suburb selector software and allowing them to use that at will and find all the information for suburbs in one place and run one suburb against the other and come up with the suburbs and then the pockets potential and the right streets and the right type of property, you know, having that narrow focus, gosh, you know, it just makes such a difference and such a quick time to enter the market rather than waiting around rages and worrying about where to buy or what to buy.

Yeah, yeah. And it's been, it's been nice going through and getting that feedback about exactly that with the beta testers too. Which of course we did with ultimate guide back in 2013 or 2012. Actually I think we started with the beta testing and yeah, it was. Reminded me what a great process that is and how valuable that is just going through that because it's easy to be, I guess, prescriptive and say, oh well, this is what you need to know. And the best way to learn it. But unless you get that user feedback, there's lots of things that you miss and sometimes they're little things, but they make a big difference to someone's learning. So there was a whole bunch of changes that we sat down and recorded last week and put back in, which is great. It just makes it so much better, so much more user friendly. And that will then, as we said before, fall back into the ultimate guide to renovation modules as well.

I think that the thing about it is, for me personally, it finally felt like my life's work had come back to fruition. Like finally all of this structure around, grab all the experts information, all the suburbs and have all this big list of suburbs, but then be able to put them into a software that allows you to work out which ones to use. For me, that has been just exactly what I've been trying to do for so long, how to do it. So I feel like it's finally come about. So I feel very, very satisfied.

Yeah, it's great, isn't it? It's. It's funny because it's got me thinking a lot about that since we started doing putting it together, pulling it, pulling it out of the ultimate guide and just putting it as a standalone thing. Just, just what that process is. And it's not, in a way, it's not a replacement or a rival to these other, you know, property softwares that have got all the bells and whistles and all that kind of stuff. It's really just a combination of saying, okay, wherever you get those suburb choices from, whether it's your dot map, which is a great tool vended by Medine Simmons, whether it's your expert reports like Terawriter Hotspotting or the hopefully this new RP data predictions report that comes out, or Jacob Fields pinpoint report or even location score, which we love using wherever you get those from, and you kind of spend as much money as you like or as little as you like on those expert reports and then out.

Of the local newspaper.

That's right, yeah, just other people's predictions and then overlaying your criteria based on your, you know, in our case, we're promoting a buy and hold strategy and that's just such a lovely, elegant solution, I think. It's not, it's not claiming to be anything more than that, really. It's just saying, okay, this is how you can take the suburbs from those different sources. Really drill down and analyze them and see if, you know, make them jump through a lot of hoops and see if they're worthwhile pursuing. And then overlaying on top of that, your personal criteria to make sure that it's a, it's something for you because you might get a suburb prediction from someone which may well grow, you know, go up in value, but it might be a Greenfield suburb or something like that that has. No, it's certainly not the ideal suburb for you if you've got, say, a buy and hold strategy, you know. So, yeah, it's, it's a very, it's very simple solution. I think that works, works really effectively.

And I mean, you and I both know there's property experts out there who have software they've developed to try to get filter down to the suburbs that they have, but it's proprietary stuff they have for their property buyer's agents business. It's not something that's commercially available to people to use and manipulate with their own filters themselves. That's why we're so excited. We're kind of giving you the. What people have behind the scenes for their data analysis available to people. So anyhow, I feel validated.

Finally.

It's taken so many years. Thank you for all your efforts, John, too. And putting all that together at Sister, it's insanely satisfying. So that's why April's big break. Big, you know, big month for us.

Yes, for sure, for sure. What else has been happening? What's been happening in your world? Well, I know one thing that's been happening in your world.

I know very big news. And those of you who've been in our community for a long time have probably been introduced or heard my sister, Peter, put in her 2 cents worth and she was one of our beta testers too. In actual fact, we have changed. Well, we tried and tested. I tried and tested, not just on myself, all of my theories and strategies and seen they work. I first went to my friends and family and made them do things and help them grow multimillion dollar portfolios. And then I went to the wider community that I wanted to share with, so had to find more friends. Right. But the lovely thing about Peter is that she and Justin got married on the weekend and it was just such a small celebration. And thank you so much. Congratulations, Peter and Justin, those who've shared on the Facebook page, because, you know, you know, Pete's very generous with her information and she's bought obviously a number of properties. But it's interesting, you know, in the speeches, Justin talked John about the fact that Peter had renovated him or restoration. He's into doing up cars, but They've also renovated together and it was kind of like a really nice reinforcement of, you know, how you can put some of these techniques in place on people too, but you got to find the right one to start.

It's just sent a shiver down the spine of every male listening.

Jay, I might have to go into a relationship. No, I can't. The interesting thing about it made me think when we're listening to these beautiful, beautiful speeches at their wedding about starting relationships and starting with a good foundation for what to build in the future. And it's very much like I mentioned it back to property, because I always do building a property portfolio. But I had a chance recently and if you haven't heard it, go back to the Capital Growth Month series that I ran within the club and I had a chat to Amanda and Amanda essentially said, you know, you actually gave my son the opportunity to speak, start a family and have a great foundation. And he and his wife, you know, less than 30, they've got the capability now, they've got a property that it's gone up in value so much they can sell. His wife can spend some time, you know, at home with the baby. And they're young to be starting a family, but from such a great foundation and it really kind of validated, you know, Justin and Peter, you know, I've helped them buy properties over the years. Pete's, you know, renovated, converted a two bedroom unit to a three bedroom unit, made 150,000 like that, you know, so, you know, it's just, it really reinforces to me how important that the foundational stuff is. And it was just so lovely to see people going and starting their lives together with that foundation in place and having done that for so many of our students as well. So, yeah, big month, but pretty exciting. My parents have just flown out today. Fingers crossed we're all safe there. But yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely been pretty good.

Yep, that's great. And are they off? Are they off now? Have they got a honeymoon to go to or what's. Where are they now?

September, back to work today. So.

Oh, wow. What did you do on the weekend?

So, but the other thing is that. Exactly. I, I think Justin didn't really tell the people that he was getting married on the weekend that what have you been up to? But the other thing that's been really great this month, John, is that there's so many comments and sharings and what's been going on within the Facebook page itself. So we've got so many things So I think I'm just looking over here at my star wall. Carolyn Kelly got a star this month and for something that's probably a little bit unexpected and that is Carolyn's part of another forum and someone on the other forum and said, you know, they'd been offered an amount, someone had door knocked and offered them some money and from the learnings that Carolyn had had in this community, she told them to go and get independent valuation. They came back with the independent valuation and what do you know, it was worth a whole lot more than what the person was offering and they were willing to accept. So, you know, that's just a little bit of success about one of our members who's sharing something that has allowed someone else to make money and not be ripped off. So that was fabulous. And I think Jordan, just where you're going past there, I might get you to go back up to those images there. We've had Mark and Helen join the community and they've shared this renovation they did in eight weeks over the Christmas holiday as a flip. And just some lovely things there. You can see we always talk about that importance of street appeal. This image right here that's about to come up, you're going to see the street appeal of. Like I said, it's just coming up on the actual Facebook page now. But the difference in the street appeal and what that looks like, they didn't even have to get rid of that great big tree. I've had to get rid of those trees in the past and had to do the. What do they call it? Basically they had to grind the stump out and I think it cost me like five grand just cleaning up a tree like that. That opens up the profile and the light is a big thing. But John, just the color schemes and everything just looks like a whole new property just from the start, doesn't it? John's not talking to me. We might go on to the next. Oh, he's taking himself down. Might go on to the next couple of images there, John. But this is a really fabulous. And I think the thing that Mark and Helen have actually shared with us here, you know, they didn't have to do a lot to the kitchen and bathroom. You can see here they've got some flooring, a nice new door, etc. They've, you know, just re surfaced the bathroom. So I encourage you to go through and have a look. And they, they shared some numbers with us, which is fabulous. And I think in the end they made about $30,000 off the property in the first in. In the eight months that they held it. So just pulling up the numbers here that are just below, as Nicole said, Jane's always going to ask you for the numbers. So they purchased at 200,000. Now, interestingly enough, they purchased this below market value. Distressed sales. There's some conversation going on there about how to get below market value. The renovation cost was $30,000, and they're buying, buying and holding and selling costs of $40,000. And they sold at 300. So they're talking about a profit before tax. There are $30,000. So, you know, that's really great. In eight weeks, if you could do that two or three times a year, that's a pretty nice price income, isn't it? So, yeah. And they did that in Perth. And, you know, we all know that the Perth market is really quite difficult. I did a deal review for one of our mortgage clients who's looking to buy in Perth recently, and I was shocked to see all the vacancy rates are well over 4%. And we talk about. First I was concerned the vacancy was over 4%, but I went through and looked at all the other suburbs and it was actually quite on the mark. And it's interesting, we're starting to see a little bit improvement in Perth. It still doesn't have the underlying economy generation that is supposed to be in place to drive the economy up. It's a. It's almost like it feels like it's their time and people are looking at some opportunities to buy low. But we usually say with vacancy rate, if the vacancy rate is 3%, it means the market is in equilibrium, which means as many people are looking to rent as those that are renting. And then I spoke to another client during the week doing a portfolio review for her, and Stacy was sharing that her son, who's a tradie over in Perth, is. Had his place vacant for three months. So we kind of came up with a few thoughts on how to improve that. Which leads me to one of the other posts, John, on the Facebook.

Can I just comment on this one for a sec? Jane, can you see that little corner desk set up there?

Yeah.

In this picture that's up on screen. I really love these little pockets that you can create in renovations. They're just. And they're often little emotional things like that that can get a buyer really excited or even a valuer. They don't often get excited, but they can. And it's often that pokey little space in a renovation that you don't think can be used for anything. Else that you can just find a little use like that, like a little desk set up that perhaps the kids could do their homework at overnight with full supervision that works really well. And sometimes that just might be the little thing that gets you that extra money for that property.

Well, I think I imagine a bit of the expense that these guys. We go through the next couple of photos as well John comes into place is that they really updated and modernized this property. They didn't necessarily do a whole lot of, you know, refurb in the kitchen or in the bathroom particularly. See, it's just kind of resurfacing.

Repainted the vanity.

Yeah, that red brick and the arches, you know, they got rid of that and they've created a real lovely living space that's somewhere that you want to hang out. And interestingly enough they also covered in the pool. So we know that pools are often depends on the location but are often an objection that people face as well in wanting to maintain one. And this prop, this. There was some conversation that went on around getting council approval actually the backfill pools can be necessary but the council all over this mill so much structural drainage that it was okay. But you know that just done a fabulous job there and I think real credit to what they've done in opening up that front and back with that nice light and airy feel to it.

Yeah, that's great.

Now I just want to jump up to Tracey's post there John, that she mentioned regarding having a number of properties that are currently vacant at the moment and some strategies around, you know, making those, those properties not vacant, tenanted. And you know there's a couple of some really great ideas that came out there around the fact that you know, they could offer you know, certain things and, and whatever. But it actually I guess my thoughts on that was that I had run through some of these scenarios with, with clients who are facing vacant properties and one in particular a gentleman who had a property up in Newman, one of the mining areas and we did a bit of a brainstorm on what he could offer because there were so many properties when the mining downturn, so many properties that were left vacant and that you know he really, he was just reducing the rate, reducing the rent. So I did a bit of a demographic and of course you know, me and censors and demography, demographic study and we looked at, you know, not surprising the age group of the people up there. Most were flying fly out men between 28 and 40 with interest in sports. They work, you know, hard 12 hour days come home, want to relax or hit the gym. So we did some suggestions, I made some suggestions about what they could do to actually increase eyes on the rental page and obviously get a tenant quickly. And one of the things that I suggested was that he actually pay for the Foxtel Premium package that was included in the rent. And I think it cost him like 50 bucks a week. But he'd already had been reducing his rent quite considerably. And when it gets a bit painful to have to pay all the mortgage with no rental increase, you know, sometimes you look at these innovative things. So he did that. The agent was just like, oh my gosh, since we've done this, the number of views on the page is exactly insane. And he rented that property really quickly. So sometimes, you know, you might have to spend a little bit. And as I suggested to Tracey and others, find out what the demographics are. If it's mum, dad and kids, it could be around having like extra security or a fence so that, you know, the kids can stay out the back if there's open out to the back. Or it could be about having pets, allowing pets in the area or in the property and having maybe a pet bond or. Or if it's near a university. It might be about actually furnishing the rooms or having wardrobes in there if there's not wardrobes, or having locks on the doors. So just work out what your demographic is, what your. And when I talk about demographics, I'm just talking about the majority of people who live in that area and who want to rent in that area. Find out who and what they are. It might mean that you have to go to some rental open homes, you know, put a Saturday aside, go and visit 10, see what people are saying, like, gee, I wish.

Jones, Lake, Smith style, my pink pants lurking around, you know, eye holes in the newspaper type of stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Now, guys, I can see we've got quite a few people who are watching this. We do have four questions that have been sent in, John, and I'm not sure if any of these people are actually online anyone wants to.

We didn't show before. Jane. We better just hold this screen for a second.

This is the picture of Peter and Justin coming out of the church. Beautiful church in St Helena out your way, John. And then gorgeous reception down at Oak Ridge in Yarra Valley. So, you know, nice wine, nice times, nice friends, nice family, lovely little intimate gathering. And I managed to call by before hair of makeup at some ungodly hour on Sunday morning to the markets and in Melbourne and pick up A couple of buckets of flower petals.

That was on your list, was it?

That was on my list. We had a four page schedule list covering the four days of exactly what had to happen. And you know, I love Excel, I love a schedule. So it was just a tick and click. Make sure you do what's on the list.

Great.

We plan weddings.

Yep, that's good. All right, now, have you got the questions there, Jo?

I have many questions I'll come across to you. Just wondering if the people are on the call. If you have a headphone and microphone, please click on that link that's at the top and we'll bring you up. We've got chains, we've got Lucinda Lucillara. Sorry, Lucelara, very big question there. And we also have. Who else do I have here? Christine and Peggy. So a few questions. So I might, might just go to one of these early ones first, John. And that's Peggy's. And Peggy, I think I've actually also answered this on the your property success club page where you asked it. But she said, hey, I'm doing my dot maps. And in the video she told me to have a look at 10 year past capital growth. Oh, if I had my magazine here, I usually have my magazines here. Let me see if I can get one for you to show you. But in your investment property magazine, what you find is that there is a number of columns of past growth. So we have the one month, 12 quarterly, sometimes 12 months, three years, five years, and then they have annual growth. Now John and I met with the people, the editor and the publisher of your investment property magazine the other day and we actually said, you guys are driving this crazy because we answer this question nearly every month. And I think, John, it's even under the video now, isn't it, that we say that the people have go to their annual average capital growth because that is actually the 10 year growth. Now you can validate that by going to the front of the data section in the your investment property magazine and you'll be able to find that the definition that says this is the 10 year capital growth figure. And what you'll find there is, you know, sometimes you'll see in the three and five year growth, it's actually cumulative. So they've actually added up like six years from year one and 6% in year one and 7% from year two and whatever. And you might get to 35% for your three year growth. But when we're talking about the annual average growth, we're talking about the fact that on average it's been 6% for the last 10 years. So that's the number of. Yeah. And just also be aware, I think.

That'S the bit that people get stuck on. It's actually the 12 month growth annualized over 10 years.

Exactly. And I think I'm going to see if I can get Diana to bring me one of the magazines because I want to hold it up because I think that it's really important that we have a look at it because we always ask this question. I think we've done this a few times John, and try to make it really obvious. But we know that people get frustrated when we. When you get up to a block and if you've got any way that you think we can make this even clearer, please do. But I've also given Peggy a little bit. Here we go. Thank you Diana. Lovely. Diana has just bought me a magazine. So I'm not sure if you're going to even be able to see this but I'm going to hold it right up here to the, the camera and you can see there you've got a number of growth areas there and one of these is the average, annual, average annual capital growth. That's the ten year growth guys. So don't be mistaken, don't be misled, it is there. And if you go through to the beginning of the magazine when we have a look at the data, watch front page and they define everything you'll see here when they're actually defining what everything means, they'll actually tell you that that's what the information is and that's where it comes from. That's a 10 year cap of growth. And note down also where the information comes from. This information comes from RP data in the suburb selective software. Our information comes from SQM research. They both have different methodologies of collecting the data so you might see some little discrepancies. And it was interesting. I had a question from one of our new ultimate guide of renovation students recently who said look, this just came, seems to be completely out of whack and it was around the median price for one of the inner city Melbourne suburbs for houses. And I went back to Louis Christopher, which is great that we've got such a great relationship. He's actually taken the data that he has on his website which is postcode driven and we've asked him to bring it all down to suburbs. So we know that there's a difference between suburbs. And the only postcode information there at the moment is obviously vacancy rates because it's measured by postcodes but that median price is actually the rolling 12 month sale price. So sometimes when you have a lot of really high sales or really low sales in a period, it can skew the data. So it's an interesting thing to watch. But Peggy. Yeah, the information is there and don't let this stop you. The 10 year growth is the number that you should be using.

Just on that they met all of those people like RP data and SQM research and apm, they measure things differently. And so the moral of that story is whatever source of data you're using, stick to that and use that each time. So you're comparing apples with apples and measure.

When you're doing your dot map, John, it's really important to just put on the corner the date that you've done it and, and the data source that you've grabbed it from. I think that in itself is really important. So, yeah, it's good to see. We've got a few comments here. Shelly and Lorraine, thank you for saying hello. Lovely to have you on board and listening live. If you've got any questions, please ask us. We know that not everyone can join us at 12 o' clock on the last Thursday of the month for these and that's why we give you the opportunity to either ring him or something, send us a question to questionsourpropertysuccess.com or come on live. But we know a lot of people watch these recordings because we know from our stats, John, that we have hundreds of people watch them within the next, next 48 hours. So don't feel that your questions are ever left out. And in the meantime, you know, this is what the club Facebook page is for where you don't just get the benefit of John and I answering your questions. You have all the hundreds and hundreds of people here to support you as well. So. And it's lovely to see so much support within the club and great big hudo. Oh, who was it?

John?

I know that Kathy lives in Sydney and she's looking to buy a property in Melbourne at the moment and someone in Melbourne actually offered to go and get a mate to go around and have a look at the property, see if it's okay. So you know, that's the kind of community that we just love that we just think it's the most beautiful property for each support group in Australia.

Good news, Jane, we've got Lucilara waiting in the wings here who may just.

Oh my God, I'm so glad to see that. Well, bring her up because her question is so in depth. I've got some of it here that I can't wait to hear it. Explain it to us.

Okay, here she comes.

Hi.

Can you hear us? Hey, how are you going?

Good.

That's good. What's your question?

So, yeah, I wrote yesterday. I wrote like three questions.

Okay, we'll take them one at a time.

Yeah, sorry, I need to open the questions because there's so many things.

Well, Jane, you might be able to prompt the first one anyway.

We can see the top of your eyebrows and your picture. Liz, you, Laura, we want to see your beautiful face. So bring it down. We're up to your nose so far. Bring it down a bit further now, I guess.

Yeah, okay, I got it here. Yeah, we want to do like an extension in our house. And my doubt is if we add two bedrooms in the existing living, existing house, it's gonna be like 2.6 for 2.8. Is that too small for the bedroom.

Or 2.6 by 2.8? Yeah, yeah, the minimum. That. And this changes. It's kind of more of a rule of thumb. But real estate agents typically Talk about a 2.4 by anything below a 2.4, whether it's width or length. They won't class as a bedroom. They'll call it study. Or some of the cheeky ones will go forward slash study at that point. So from a technical point of view, it's not too small, but it's a little bit of a different answer when it comes to being a buyer. Objection. I guess, Jane. Depending on where the property is and so on.

Yeah, look, I'm just looking at. I understand that this property is in Edelong Beach. I'm just looking at the census data. So I've just gone to ABS gov au and put in Edelong Beach. You know, it's interesting. 47% of the properties there are three bedrooms, but 34% are two bedrooms. So it's not as if the two bedroom is a property that's not in demand in itself. So I think that's interesting. Now I've got here. Okay, so you've also, when you went, the builder actually said to you that it's an asbestos wall. So it's going to get expensive to make one of the new bedrooms bigger.

And.

So you're worried about the asbestos issue as well. So usually. And your husband thinks that no one can live there if you actually break through the asbestos wall. Do you want to talk to that John?

Yeah, can you hear me there, Joe?

I think Johnson's muted himself.

Can you hear me now, Jane?

Yeah.

Well, let me ask that question. One of the things is the builders or people who are used to using working with asbestos, it's not unusual but you do have to comply to the safety requirements. So you know, wrapping in a black plastic mask, etc. It's not something you do yourself. So the fact that your husband's concerned about the fact that you start knocking through walls that are already determined to be asbestos, that it could be a safety risk is completely right. But once it's been removed and cleaned up, then you know the property is completely livable. And I can see that you've also said that there's down the street from you there's also property that's been knocked down and created townhouses but you're not really ready at this stage to do developments. And is it better to extend the house, adding two bedrooms or building your granny flat of two bedrooms in the back is a separate dwelling. And you're saying that the market price for a four bedroom house is 850 and the two bedroom house is 650. My impression here is if you're going to be doing a box on the back and let's say John would probably say a minimum spend before fit out of like 110 and maybe 30 grand depending on the fixtures and fittings that you want. So maybe 150 to you know, do that kind of change from a two bedroom to a four bedroom. I'm not too sure if going from 650 to 850, you know, and all of the kind of improvements that you would do in addition to that is going to, if you're looking to flip, going to be enough of a gap in there for you to be able to do that. The rent would go from 450 to 550 a week to 350 up to maybe 450 a week. I think it's a lot of work to convert a two bedroom into a four bedroom. Especially looking at Etalong Beach. We've got the census data to say only 9.6% of people want a four bedroom. So you know, if there is townhouses, 35% of people are happy to to be in a townhouse terrace, semi detached, 52% in the houses. So it would seem to me if you're going to do an either or, they're seeing the data at this stage based on the 2016 census would indicate that there is more likelihood of a townhouse development. Maybe a two or three bedroom Two or three bedroom townhouse development would be more acceptable than a form bedroom house. And the expenditure that you would spend on that, does that make sense?

Yes, yes, yep.

And as for the granny flat, I can't really comment on the granny flat as a kind of a increase in value because it may be something that's not that common. Let me think, who do I know? Lorraine's up there. Lorraine might actually type into the Facebook page if she's aware of granny flats in that area because I know she's been out there searching for properties a lot, but granny flats area that are typical but it would be something that you would do to increase the rent rather than anything else. So to me, if I was looking at your situation, so you've already got a number of properties, congratulations. You've already got a passive income that is being generated property. So you're definitely doing something right there, which is fabulous. But I can see sometimes you want to look at how you can improve your properties and this renovation that you're talking about in September in adding the two bedrooms or box at the back. I'm just not too sure if it's going to be the best use of your money. You know, your goal is to add another two properties in the next two years and increase your passive income by $70,000. I think that potentially just looking at this area that the money could be spent elsewhere better. Maybe there's an opportunity. You know, the box on the back, say 130, 140 is kind of like the same price range that you would have for a 25 flat. And you potentially just looking at this, you're probably going to have a better yield characteristic than granny flat. But I don't think, you know, taking a typical property of a two to three bedroom at Interlock beach and making it into four bedroom, you really creating a niche property that there doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for. Well, definitely not a lot of the properties there. There might be demand because it's very, very limited, but there definitely is not a lot of those properties. Four bedroom.

Lorraine's just got a comment to add to that. Adding a granny flat doesn't add a lot of value. Just rent.

Okay.

Just rent.

Yeah. Okay. So thanks Lorraine, for bringing your market knowledge in there. Hey Kristen. We've got Kristen there too. And Michelle. Okay. And okay, we'll come to Michelle's question. And you've got a special question here. I'm thinking this is a question you're looking at applying for a loan as well. Yeah, you've reached your borrowing capacity and your idea was to get equity out of that property. And you've also got other equity, one of your other properties because of a renovation with a twist. You're waiting. You're not a permanent resident. So you're right. Some of the lenders have become quite a lot stricter on whatever visa you have. They've become a lot more restrictive. But you have been a customer with one of the big four banks for a period of time and you were an employee, but now you are working as a sole trader, but you've been doing it for three years. So the good thing is when you are a. And you're a bookkeeper, accounting background, tax consultant. So you know, you know this better than anyone. A lot of accountants try to make your income look less, so you pay less tax. But the problem is you can't borrow when you have that. Yeah, yeah. And what we really need to do is we need to, you know, you need to get a period of time where you can actually have two years of consistent income. Some lenders like CBA and ANZ actually look at one year of your, your past sole trader, abn, self employed income. They do expect you to have, for those listening, not for you, because I know you've been in business for three years. They do expect you to have an ABN for three years. And what else is there any other questions there around the borrowing? And they can't accept that. The CBA manager said they can't accept that. The only way that they may accept that. And as you know, lending is not a whole lot lighter. I did some analysis with my mortgage broker a couple of weeks ago and there was one lender that was a room by room income. If you could prove it over a period of time, which obviously comes through your tax return anyhow.

So they weren't using the tax return.

Yeah.

In the tax return we put only as like a full house. We are not putting in the tax return like each room.

No.

But what your rental income come through and that's reflective of the fact that you are renting room by room with that higher yield. Yeah. Be aware though that most lenders now have capped your rental yields to.

It.

Depends, some to 6% I think amp is 6%. Others are capping it to the interest rate that they're doing their assessment on, which is 7.2%. So it might be a lot of time and effort that's been capped. But I know that, I think you're having a chat with Lisa, aren't you? We I'm pretty sure there's no.

Room.

By room so Miguel, I need to listen. Okay. And oh and your last question is about buying in a trust. We should be open a trust before we loan and buy the next house on the trust. Our previous the bank marriage is said if you open a trust it'll be the same process for finance but if the trustee would be more difficult is right. There is a lot of different types of trusts. So you've got family trusts, you know, unit trust, family trust, discretionary trusts, hybrid discretionary trusts. And some of them are for tax reasons. For instance a high income earner and a low income earner in the same relationship and buying entity you could allocate maybe the positive cash flow to the low income one year or for instance if you're selling and you're making a profit, you could put that onto the low income person's income. So pay less tax in theory. I'm not a tax consultant as you heard from John's disclaimer in the front. We could also put the income to the high income tax owner if it's a negative gear. So that's how some of that discretionary kind of trust work. Other people who are flipping properties sometimes put properties in trust because with company trustees because they're under the company trust structure which you know we'll wait for the budget next week but you know maybe there's going to be a reduction in that as well. But I think the thing is it really comes down to you speaking to so that's is general information, you speaking around your specific circumstances to your accountant, not your bank manager or your financial planner about the trust structure. From a lending point of view, not uncommon for people to have their trust structure set up with a company corporate trustee. That's common. The thing that the lenders do hate and this type of trust structure isn't as common now as it was. I think it was who was it Shannon who came up with the hybrid discretionary trust where you kind of have a hybrid of both trust structures and the banks don't like that. So you know that that becomes a problem in trying to refinance and getting financed because they can't really clarify what's going on. Sometimes you pay a little bit more when you have a trust structure for your legal fees because they need to go through the whole trust similar to if you have a self managed super fund and you have a trust structure there as well. But find out first and foremost if the trust structure is your interest. It doesn't sound like you're flipping, you're building a portfolio. Congratulations, you've got a good cash flow being generated by your portfolio already. But I can't really comment if it suits you or not. But from a finance point of view, it's not uncommon to have a corporate trustee. We do those quite common, commonly within at Investors Choice mortgages for our clients. But just make sure it's for you is in the right interest. I know I've got three copies of trusts and they're hybrid discretionary trusts and I can't refinance them. Drives me crazy. So, you know, I wish I could get them out of the trust I did look into a few years ago, but I think it was like $90,000 in stamp duty just to get out of the trust. So, you know, we're in it now, but access to my own personal circumstances. So I think go and talk to someone about it and about your strategy first of all and find out if it's in your interest.

Okay.

Yeah, fabulous. Well, thank you so much for sending your questions through. Thank you for sending it through on questions as well because it allowed me to quickly have a look at it beforehand and get a bigger picture. But I really appreciate you joining us and I hope that's helped. Okay.

Yeah, it's helped.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Let's get on for today.

Okay. So Jane, I've got a question in comments here from Michelle and that is. Hi Jane and John, still on module 2. So much learning going on. Quick question, in case I've missed it. Where do you get the data to see disparity between renovated and unrenovated properties?

Look, it's a really good question. I mean, John, you did this exercise when you were looking in Essendon, didn't you? And you were kind of like going to the auctions every week and taking down option prices. And record, do you want to tell what you were doing a manual process.

The very manual and long way is to simply record the. And you can do this if you've got past sales data. But basically what you want to know is if you were to do it yourself is you want to know the sale price, you want to know where it's situated, you know, in the suburb and, and then how many bedrooms it is and the state of it. So when I say the state of it, we used to list it's either unrenovated, which we classify as anything that hadn't been renovated in the last, say 20 years or more. It was just that kind of the irky test would the wife walk in and go, no way, I'm not living here. So that was unrenovated, I love it. Or dated was just basically is it maybe it's been done in the 90s or to 2000s and it's still pretty solid and everything straight and all that kind of stuff, but it's just dated, it's starting to date. And then renovated. So renovated in the last five years, typically we would then record the price for each of those three categories and work out a price per square metre and then also work out where in the suburb those properties were selling. So if you looked at a street, for instance, you could see across the spectrum of that street, of those sales, you know, what were the unrenovated properties selling for compared to what the renovated properties were selling. So that's a long and manual way to do it. What we had, thanks to Jane collaborating with John Edwards from Residex, was the Renovators Top 100 report which is now unfortunately disappeared because Residex got gobbled up by Apidata Professional Professional, sorry, Core Logic RP data. But hopefully they're coming out with some, some new reports in the future which might go some way to working out for that. But the only other way Jane, that I can think of is, is basically what you're trying to do is you're trying to look for a broad range of prices on a street. And again it's. This is a bit of a blunt way of doing it because you can't tell what's unrenovated and what's renovated. But if you think of what a street might look like in terms of a broad spread of values, if you can see for instance if a street starts at you know, 550 at the lower end and let's say you're looking within the last worth of sale. So it starts at 650 at the lower end for the maybe the two better, which is in really rough condition and then up to at the top end of the street, you know, maybe a million or over, then you're starting to see a nice spread of A's. But in other places you might only see that it starts at 650 and gets just over the 8s for instance. And that would show that there's less of a spread of values. So that just in terms of a price range shows you that there's a spread of values and potentially pricing disparity there. But then you need to dive deeper into those sales on that street and say okay, well is it actually the unrenovated properties that are selling at the lower end and the renovators at the upper end. Or is there some other factor at. Because sometimes it might be that one end of the street is much more popular because it's near the transport or the freeway, you know, whatever that is, or the shops or it's the prestigious end. So there's lots of other factors that can come into that other than just, you know, lower end of the spectrum means unrenovated.

Yeah, I think it's really important as well. There is an RP data report called the Market Trends Report and the Market Trends Report actually shows some discrepancies as well that you can use or look at. And I think it does the median price and it does 25% below and it does the 75, 25, 50, 75%. And from there you can almost look at what some differentials are like between the 25 and 70, 75% mark because we really want to be buying below the market so below the median and renovating above it so that 25 to 75 kind of fits in. When we used to do this in the renovator report, John we were looking around the, you know, when they, when John had the 0 to 10, we're looking around the 3 to fours and trying to get up to 7 to 8. So using the data we have. But I do have, I do have a sample market trends report that was sent to me from CoreLogic and the interesting thing about the this information is that the CoreLogic, you know, their reports have got a whole lot cheaper recently and they've got a single state used to cost you for the year $7,500 to get all the data which you know would give you a substantial amount of data regarding what was going on, all the past data etc and all these sale data. But they've only just now said that you can actually buy it for a month if you want for $625. So as yet I haven't done that. But you know, if you were just looking in one state and you were wanting to spend that money in theory you could buy that and get that differential in the suburbs by suburb. And I know there's another company who purchases the RP data information and they report this on suburbs and they're called risk wise. So we're still doing a little bit of research to find different ways for people to get that kind of differential. One of the things that I do, you know, obviously I've got the RP data professional subscription and I'm in there. And I'm looking at the past sales over this last six months, months or 12 months. And I'm looking at those that are renovated and those that aren't renovated. A little bit less of a manual process than hitting the streets like John does. But, you know, that really allows me to see, you know, and often, often when I'm doing deal reviews for mortgage clients with the properties that put an offering on and just getting a second set of eyes, I, I pull up the RP data professional and I pull up that suburb and I pull up the market sales recently and I'm just looking at, you know, what the typical property looks like and what it's sold for, the typical size, etc. Making sure it's comparable to what they're looking at. So, you know, there's a number of different ways you can do this. Obviously, you know, buying a very expensive report for the month and you know, is expensive, or just getting a suburb report, which I think, I think they're less than $100 from risk wise or, you know, manually hitting the streets and going through and recording the data as well. There's a number of ways you can do it, Michelle.

The other thing, Michelle, you're about to hit module three and that's got the price pin map in it, which we failed to mention before. So that's just a matter of pinning out the sales. Again, it's a manual process, lot easier and quicker than I described before, going through the opens or recording the sales data and it's just pricing, putting the pins out. Different colour pin represents a different price range. It might be 50,000 or $100,000. And then what you get is a pattern that goes across that entire suburb and you can see where the lower price bins are in relation to the higher price bin. So obviously you want to buy at the low and sell or revalue at the high. So that's another way of doing it. But I guess what we've lost with the renovation reports is we can still do it. There's different ways. We can do it at a suburb level, on an individual suburb, but we can't work out where are the best suburbs because we don't have that top 100 rep anymore, which, which used to say, okay, here are the suburbs that have the most streets with the greatest spread of values. We don't, we don't have anything that's replaced that, unfortunately at the moment, but we'll let you know if something comes up.

I know, I know, it's, it's kind of frustrating, isn't it John?

It is, yeah. Massively. Yep. It was a big blow.

And I think the thing is, one of the other things that you can do and what we suggest you do is if you have access to RP data professional you can go through and that's where you get the sale history from. Like if you don't have a great real estate agent, we suggest you ask your illustrate agent for the sale history. So other three bedroom houses within the suburb of sold for the last three years, you ask for that and then as John said, we'll teach you in module three. But the price pin allows you to say, you know, between 350 and 400,000 is the green pin. So you've got where all the green pins are and it shows you what side of the street, what side of the, the freeway or you know, where the golden circle is or where the higher prices are. And that's, that's also very interesting because sometimes you've got an outlier within a grouping, like what's that? And that could be the renovated property. So wait till you get into that and, and I think you'll, you'll really enjoy that. Module three.

Yeah, great. Now Viv's been waiting patiently for us. Let's bring Viv up onto the screen and see what Viv's got to say.

Hey guys, how are you?

Good, really good. How are you?

Really good. I was just interested to see what was happening so I thought I'd hop on and have a listen.

I heard on the grapevine that this week you've been visiting one of our friends in Brisbane.

I have, yes. I went up to see Russell and he's doing an amazing job. I hope to get up there soon because by the time I get up there next he'll have ripped everything out and replaced it all and it'll all be over. He's a crazy man that he wasn't going to let his helper eat until he'd done X amount of work. So that may be.

Fair enough. That's not his dog he's talking about, is it?

No, no, not his dog is dogs walking around. But no, he's got a mate up there that gets free room and board. But at the moment when I was up there it was still like very bare boards and only basically a room. So I'm hoping the food was better.

That's great. And you helped him out with some resources and so on because Russell's from Melbourne and for people that don't know, Russell's was one of Wendy. I think he did the ultimate guide in 2014 and this is his second property that he's onto now, but he's from Whittlesea in Victoria and he's renovating in Queensland. So it sounds like you've been helping him out a bit, Viv, with giving him some supplies and that kind of thing. Yeah.

Told him whereabouts things were. You know, the Bunnings is this way and you know, the High Grace bathrooms this way. And sent him some dump batches because obviously that was going to be a huge expense up here. So I've got a few properties there, so had a few to spare.

Yeah.

So he's. We were looking at blinds and things the other day, so I think he's got it all sorted.

Great.

He actually brought up all his tiles I could have, you know, I said, oh, what about National Tiles? And he goes, well, actually, I got this leftover stuff, stuff from another job of my son, so I brought them up. So he had this trailer loaded with tiles. It was amazing.

For someone who took 25 years to take action. Now he's taking action. He's really going for it, isn't he? Oh, he is, yeah.

And he's so enthusiastic about it. It's great.

Yeah. I think that's the thing that I love about renovation. I know you do a lot of renovations as well and you speak to a lot of renovations with Renaissance, but, you know, there is a. It's not a medic quality, but when you're in. Gosh, you're so into that, aren't you completely focused on getting. It's like people searching for properties. It's like every waking hour, you're looking, looking, looking and thinking about where to find the property. But for me, I know pre renovation, I'm always, I'm running, you know, quotes against tiles or heaters or floor coverings or whatever it is. That's insane. It's all you think about. I know.

And you get so many calls and everything, so I know a poor man, he was quite upset about the price of the electricians up here. So you must have better priced electricians down there, because they do. It's like wounded poor quality up here, but it's one of the things that you need so.

Well, it's an interesting point because we had someone who was on one of our calls, oh, last year, John, I think. And you can go back, obviously if you're in the club, you can go back to the member page and listen to all the past calls, but she was in Daylesford and I think her pest and building inspection was like $1,500, where we kind of expected building inspection to be maybe 500, maybe 150 to 250 for the pest inspection. So there's quite a lot more. There's a group called Seeking Services, or is it Services Seeking? Service Seeking.

They.

They run some really interesting analysis and I get some of their press releases sometimes that I share within the club, but they actually show what the different trades are in different states, what the costs are. So if you are planning a renovation interstate, it's probably worthwhile having a look at that. So you aren't surprised by electrician rates like Paul Russell was.

Yes, I know. I learned that the hard way when I did a Renault up in Toowoomba, which was not all that fun, far from us. You know, it's probably an hour or two's drive, but the price has been up substantially. In fact, even some of the tradies had said that they'd moved from the Gold coast up to Toowoomba because the prices that they were going to get were a lot more up there than was too much competition on the Goldies. So they moved to Toowoomba to get more money.

Interesting.

So, yeah, it does really change the PIN depending on where you are.

Yeah, for sure. Cool.

Well, thanks for joining us, Viv. I really appreciate all the efforts you put into the club and helping out people like Russell, who's Brisbane and needs a bit of a hand.

Yeah, well, if anyone else is doing a Renault around the place, I'm happy to pop in. Or just give me a call if.

You'Re looking for something.

We're good.

Yep, it'd be great from Renault. Save all of those people who are in Ultimate Guide a renovation. We're going to be organizing after 30 days. We organize that card to come out from you and they'll come out from Viv and you'll get all those wonderful savings that she's already negotiated. I know I saved thousands on my white goods package, which was actually stainless steel really, for my kitchen when I did my last kitchen in Sydney cleanup last year. So, yeah, great, great way. All the great discounts that have been negotiated on your behalf.

Yeah, I do try to ring everybody too, just sort of run it through for them because, like, they. Sometimes they've got this card and they don't know what to do with it. And hey, they could be out there if they're not renovating, they could still be getting two for one dinners and movie tickets and, you know, like so many different savings on that part of it as well. So yeah, like if you're interested to know more, I'm happy to have a chat.

Great, thanks a lot. See ya.

See ya.

Now John, I've got some more questions that have been sent through.

Great, you go for it, Jane.

Oh, Simon, welcome. Oh, I'm glad he's on his lunch break. So we're not getting any trouble listening to this. Now James has actually sent in a question and he said one of the main points is finding the right suburb or right location 5 and he said look, I've got a limited budget. What if I had a limited budget, say $300,000 then how do you get lots of information on regional areas such as Bendigo, Tamworth, Dubbo, etc. These aren't in the suburbs led to software. This is assuming you can't afford other pay subscriptions as well. So it's a really good question James, and I think it's really interesting John, if you have a look at the top of the your property situation club page and we look about where people actually come from, we can see we've got a substantial amount of people in Sydney and Melbourne but hey, it's almost the same amount regionally. So we know that there's a lot of people who regionally are actually part of our community and purchasing. And one of the very active and great supporters that we have, Damien, who's discussed with us his properties that he has in Tamworth in the past and one of the past, I think he's got three rental properties in Tamworth at the moment. And you know, we've got other people who are buying within regional areas. And you're right, the suburb selector software, the information and just because the discrepancy on smaller town sizes is, you know, when we have a very small group or suburb even, we find that a couple of sales can just throw the numbers out completely. So you know, if I don't believe in the integrity of the information that comes out now in the suburbs selector software we do have some of those major regional areas, Newcastle, Central Coast. So just as a little tip, if you're trying to look at the Central coast or you know, even Singleton, Scone, et cetera, go to Newcastle. And when you're putting the distance from the suburb, you might put 150km in and up comes the other suburbs like the Central coast and you know, Singleton, Maitland, etc. Or from Sydney you might do 150km. We also have Wollongong in as one of the major regionals and we have Geelong now we did have Bendigo and Ballarat, John, but we were finding the information was a little bit skewed just because of the fact that they don't have that many sales and and I want you guys to be, you know, using the best quality data as possible. So that's also comes down to your.

Property choice as well, doesn't it? Because that's why that data is important. Not just because it means that we've got reliable data in the suburb selector software, but so you've got reliable data to make those investment decisions where. So it made more sense for us to gravitate to areas that did have enough data to be statistically reliable.

Exactly. And we're hand on heart, we look at the areas that have gone up in value and have multi industry incomes and where the population are and we're looking at the major regionals and those major capital cities. And I was reading a population study report that came out on Tuesday and I think the estimates of what the Australian population were going to be at 25 million was to be mid this century. We've already hit it, you know, so there's a lot of infrastructure changes and planning and things that are needed for the capital cities but more than 70% of people live in those capital cities not and you know, a major component after that in the regional setting. So doesn't get to me to your question, James. Your question is how can I afford to buy and find the information? So let's just say you do have a price point. I'm going to take a break just to say you do have a price point of $300,000 then and which is fine. And we do have people use the techniques that we teach to do this when we talk about location Masterclass or the location module 2, module 3, module 4 within ultimate guided Renovation or some of the techniques that you get within the club if you're a club member and in the club membership page, some of those aren't as relevant. I don't think the dot map exercise is as relevant. And that's because, because you know, if I'm dotting Dubbo, I love Dubbo, I'm from Dubbo, lived in Dubbo for many a year. There's only East Dubbo, North Dubbo, South Dubbo, West Dubbo, you know, you can't really get that ripple effect effect that you're getting in the capital cities. So I wouldn't be dot mapping Dubbo. I wouldn't be dot mapping, you know, parks or, or Bathurst or, or some of these areas. Now, we have DOT mapped John Bendigon and Geelong in the past and we do get some information. But one of the things that we say is, you know, we're not prescribing one specific technique to find the next hotspot or the next suburb. We're saying take all the experts information. So for instance, I would be looking at those major regional reports around the hotspots that Terry Rider does, for instance, around infrastructure, etc. You know, we know there's a huge rail going between Bristol and Melbourne. There's going to be a lot of regional towns that are affected by that. We know, you know, Albury, Wodonga is a great, you know, hub for transport, et cetera as well. So we know there's a couple of those major regional areas where the price points are lower. I know Ballarat, for instance, you know, we've had a look there for, and I've done some deal reviews for clients who've been buying there in that 250, 300 range. So I guess the thing is that the methodology of doing your research and understanding, understanding where to buy can be applied anywhere. And we have people who've used the ultimate glide renovation to buy in New Zealand and in Amsterdam, you know, so we know that the methodology works and the methodology is around getting the information and then assessing one suburb against the other. So the information, you know, that we've collated in the suburb selector software, you can pull from sensors yourself, you can pull from the back of the magazines, you can get from RP Data Professional. You can pull this together and you can run one area against the other. But, you know, we get down from, you know, select your suburb, you know, have your criteria right, get streets in the suburb where the renters want to be and you can see how to do that. You know, you could buy a subscription to Ripe House or you can use the table builder component, it's free in Census, or you can use Microburbs and we teach you obviously all that in, in the courses, et cetera. So you know how to do that. You get down to the right street, you can then pull out what the typical property is. We just saw in the exercise that we did earlier in Edelong beach, you know, a typical property was either three or four bedrooms. So we could find out what that is. And then, you know, as I've shown in the past, I would then jump onto SQM research and find out what the typical size block is. So you've actually got down from the suburbs to the streets to the House to the box size. So when you actually have those properties come up for sale and you know, we teach you how to do that in RP Data Professional with the territories, you get the alert, so you're headed the game. So it doesn't really matter, James, what your price point is. It's about using the fundamentals of the research process to get the typical property that the most the market wants in the area that want to live. And when you're running one suburb against the other, looking at the data, so you're looking at things like income levels and yields and past growth and things that could drive future growth like infrastructure or spend expenditure or things that are going to attract the population to the area and you know, percentage of renters and number of sales. All of that stuff that we talk about. Summer select software. We've also got John, in the modules, the original spreadsheet that you can do. And fill this in yourself.

Yes, yeah, a bit more of a manual process, but yeah, you just have to do a little bit more work. I guess the other thing there, Jane, is just trying to start from the position of whatever your budget is, is where is the best possible place you can park it. So rather than saying I've only got 300 so I'm only going to look in, you know, wherever Bathurst, say rather than doing that, it's like trying to be agnostic regardless of where that budget is. Looking around. Yep.

Thank you so much for your question, James. I hope that helps.

Perfect. All right, so I've got another question here from Freeanne who says hypothetically, if you are cosmetically renovating a three bedroom house, how many hours should you expect to spend coordinating the renovation?

How long was that piece of string, John?

Well, you might be better off for this one than me, Jane, because most of the time with the renovations I'm pretty hands on. Whereas you've coordinated quite a few times. Well, two recently that I know of.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, Frian, it's an interesting question because it really depends around the scope of works that you have. So we talk about taking those inspection checklists that, that we have to go and look at the property and obviously we have like, you know, a number of checklists in there that get down to what kind of work's involved. So you could do something like we saw earlier with Mark and Helen who just resurfaced a bathroom or you might pull the whole bathroom out and redo it. You might be gutting the property. You might be, you know, putting floorboards down or new carpet or painting the whole property you might be seeing, staging the front landscaping, you might be doing a whole kitchen. The actual planning of what the renovation should do and coordinating it before you put even as you know from our strategies on how to purchase a property, before you even put in the offer, you know the works that need to be done and the potential using the Quick quote calculator in Module 5, the ultimate guide to Renovation. You know how much they spend. Those works should really cost you. So you've got a plan for the works that is needed to bring your property up to. If you're renovating up to the standard of the renovated property. When you're actually looking at getting quotes, you know, I often start with, let's just say I was doing carpets and I was doing tiles and I was getting a bathroom or a kitchen done. Then you know what you're doing often is you're actually coming up and most of the work is actually coming up with specification, what you want. So the layout of the kitchen, for instance, or the layout of the bathroom, did you want a frameless shower or did you not want a frameless shower? You coming up with that information is really about you collecting the information you want. We talk about creating a swipe file, so creating the images, pulling out the images or putting them on Pinterest of what you would like to create create with your renovation. And also, you know, this is one of, one of the reasons I use RP Data Professional and those sale data information so much is I want to see what the standard of the sales of the properties are so I can go through all the photos of the properties that have been listed and sold and see, you know, are we talking system? Are we talking Lemon X? So I make the plan around, you know, what the standard I want and then once you have that specification, you're not airy fairy. So every time you talk to a kid kitchen designer or a kitchen provider, you, you're all over the place. I would then just go and get the quotes. So for my recent renovation that I did in Sydney, for instance, I knew what I wanted to do with the kitchen. So I had the layout plan for the kitchen, I had the quotes done by a couple of people who were going to manufacture the kitchen. I then went and selected a tile. Now I went to National Tiles and I also went to Harvey Norman because obviously this commercial deal with Renosafe and I also went to Bunnings and I knew the type of tile that I was after and I had a look at those three tiles. I selected one and had them delivered to Sydney. So for the bench top, for the Caesarstone bench top that I ended up getting, I selected that color down here in Melbourne and just let my kitchen person know up in Sydney what I wanted. The color scheme, I went with a very clean. You know, we make recommendations about clean colors in the course Ultimate Guide renovation. So, you know, I just went with this typical color so I can turn up with my pot in every place that I've got and do any touch ups whenever I happen to be in town. But you know, I think it's around if you don't specify exactly what you want, you could spend and waste hours on this. So. So I would always start with first being very clear of what you need to achieve. Three carpet quotes, three tile quotes, all those kind of things. And then getting the trades in. And if you find a trade that you really like, ask them to recommend someone that they like working with. Because if they're a very good tradesperson and have good quality of care, then they often like to work with people like that as well. So that would be my thoughts. It's hard to give you a number of hours, but that's where you'd start for sure.

When I, when I was doing the developments, it used to be typically. And then that's a pretty full on process. But I wasn't managing the builders for that. Typically It'd be between 20 and 30 hours a week I would do for that. But yeah, so that's. That would be at the more extreme end, I would think it'd be quite a bit less than that.

And I think once you're coordinating the renovation as well. When I did that remotely recently from Sydney, I just had the trades call in at the end of the day or send me a. We just do a quick little catch up over the phone and they'd show me what they'd done. I wasn't there all the time, but previously when I project managed, I probably met the trades there in the morning. I've made sure everyone knew what they, they were doing for the day and whose next job was coming along next. And then at the end of the day I'd go and check out what had been done and be ready there to let them in the next morning and make sure they knew what they needed to do. So one thing is coordinating the renovation, the next thing is managing it. And really the managing bits a bit easy once you've done all the work and knowing what has to happen in what sequence.

Yep. And give them each other's phone numbers. As well and tell them to coordinate each other and the best things you can do. They prefer that anyway. And just. Just tell them to basically just keep you up to speed. And that way you're not creating a bottleneck or inserting yourself as a bottleneck between people who are used to working together.

John, I've got another question here from Christine.

Great.

I think this one's for you. Hi. My son purchased a house with a dated slanted pine lining boards on several walls in several rooms In a typical Western 70s Westerns red cedar ranch style home.

Oh yeah.

High pine line ceilings and exposed beams. Should he remove the wall timber and plaster or plaster straight over it? And then I've got. Sorry. Also the front facade is western red seated boards under a veranda. The previous owner has painted around the window frames in cream and white. Would you suggest painting over the cedar boards to give it a facelift? The colorbond roof is a faded colorbond moss greenish color. Any tips would be great.

Yeah, those kind of properties always lots you could do. It's more of a question of whether you want to or whether it actually adds value or not. So the first thing I would do is I can kind of picture in my mind what kind of place that is with the cedar and reasonably exposed beams and all of that kind of thing. If that was typical for the area, like if there was other houses like that in the area, then I'd be thinking of trying to do as little as possible and just doing is, you know, looking at where you're renovating up to looking at what those houses look like and just trying to fill in the gap of saying, okay, what. What would be the. Almost the minimum I would have to do to get it up to that level, to either sell at that level or revalue at that level or rent at that level. If it's an anomaly and not the case, then if we go through them one by one. Yes, you can plaster over lining board if you had to. A lot of the cases lining board will paint up. Okay. And you can even have a mixture of lining board and plaster within a room without it being a great buyer. Objection. But you know, in the case study we used in the. In the free video series that. In the. Which runs up to the Ultimate Guide to Renovation, we did do that. We plastered over lining board. In that case it was because it had a big ugly 70s archway that kind of was into the bargain, which we had to plaster that up anyway. So it made more sense just to, you know, spend 40. Yeah. Couple of extra sheets to do the rest of the wall. But always start from the default of if I don't have to do it, I won't do it. And is it a. Is it a high return item? And a high return item to me is a tap or a light. Is a high return item because it's shiny and it's small and it costs very little, but adds a lot of perceived value to the room. Or is it just a kind of a low return item or a no return item? So no return item would be, you know, replacing the electrics or replacing the plug. Plumbing. You know, a house should have electrics or plumbing. There's no perceived value in that. Yeah. And a low return item might be something like the difference between a painted lining board and a painted plaster wall, you know, to someone walking in there. And if you think about it, this perception is the name of the game. So if you think about either a valuer coming in to revalue the property or a buyer coming in to buy the property because they. That's the way a value will be, thinking about it is what are they going to see and look at in that kind of 15 minute inspection and what's the perception of value going to be? And that's where you kind of. That's the framework you view those decisions for, like painted, you know, lining board versus painted plasterboard. So that's the way I'll be looking at it. In terms of your exposed beams. Again, if it's not typical for the area, you can, you can paint the beams and paint the ceiling and, and it'll fade away a little bit. Worst case, and I assume depending on how high it is, you can always batten over the beams if. Unless they're too far apart. But there's ways. You just have to increase the batten size if that was the case. And then you can plaster over the beams themselves if you wanted to get rid of that look altogether and have a lined plaster ceiling. But all, again, just needs to be weighed up whether that's necessary to do because that, you know, the price would mount up to doing that. What was the last one there? Jane was always the outside.

Yeah. Yes, Miranda. Red cedar boards. They've already painted the window frames cream white.

Yeah. Yeah. If again, without seeing, without knowing the kind of neighborhood and everything. The thing is, once you paint a cedarboard house that there's no going back. You'll never be back to a cedarboard house again. And if that has any kind of appeal in that area, you know that that opportunity is gone. So on the other hand, if it is an anomaly and you know, it's the kind of place that as you think about that perceived value as the couple that pull out the front of the house, they just go and keep on driving, you know, for the open for inspection, then definitely, definitely I'd be painting paint. In conversation with Russell this week about spraying. We had a property in New South Wales where we spray painted the outside and the inside and the roof. And Russell's doing this in his property, not the roof, but he's doing inside and outside in his property in Queensland at the moment. That's an option where you can, you know, hire a sprayer or even a painter and a sprayer and they can change the. If you, you know, doing all of the outside, particularly if you do the. The great tip is to do the eaves and the wall the same color because then you don't have that awful time consuming cutting in which also shows up every single line between the. Even the wall. So you can definitely change the color quite quickly by spraying and yeah, and that'll. That'll change the paint. There's nothing more bang for buck than paint, you know, that changes the perception real quick and not, you know, for not a lot of money. So that would be the other option there, Jane. I think that was it as far as the trims and stuff goes. I mean a cream can certainly date a property, but a lighter color is good on trims. It tends to not be an objection to anyone and kind of just, you know, blends in, doesn't stand out.

And just a bit of a call out to Christine. She did send an email through to support with this question earlier but. And we'd had a bit of a tag team on emails. But what's wonderful is she's got so much value out of the videos and the renovation videos and subsequently joined the club. But she's got two kids that have both bought their first properties very recently and one of them bought $85,000 under the initial price. So really hitting that tried and strategy five below I should get for doing that buying below the market. Case of beer and she. And she even managed to get the property 10,000 under her initial offer, which is fabulous. And her son, who this property is, he bought $77,000 under the budget. So you know, it was pretty, it's pretty good that first two properties they did that and she's taking a lot from the videos and the course and helping them improve their property. So I'm glad that we can help. So John, I reckon it's time we might have to wrap up. It's so good to see so many people on here live, which is fabulous. And thank you so many to all of you who have sent in questions beforehand. Once again, you know the club's probably not a place for support. I've seen a few people have been putting support questions in there recently. We don't always get the support team watching the club. If you have got support question, get into supportourpropertysuccess.com and we'll get your questions answered ASAP. If you do have a question for our monthly chat Q and a call here questionsourpropertysuccess.com so John, I think you are typing something in frantically there. Did you have something to say? Hey Aaron, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Nope, can't hear John. No. Okay, so. Oh, I can hear you.

Yeah. Oh, fabulous. Sorry, we're all frozen at this end now. So I just popped a message through to your phone but. So I can't see you but it looks like you're still on. So I think we're at time now anyway.

Well, look, I think it is an hour and a half, John. We're back to it. We used to do two hours but the last couple of months we haven't had that many questions. Obviously we've answered them in the club but thank you so much guys for joining us. As you know, we really believe in this very special community and helping you out and you know, if you have any, any questions, once again, jump into the club, ask the questions. Any support questions, head to support@your propertysuccess.com There is that 1300 number that you can leave a question on if you would like which is 1300, what is it? 1300 76. Triple 1 9. But as always, here is to your property success. I hope you have a great month and we look forward to talking to you next month.

Sam.